An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path. He wasn’t sure of which direction to go, and he’d forgotten both where he was traveling to…and who he was.

He’d sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him.

She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: “Now your third wish. What will it be?”

“Third wish?” The man was baffled. “How can it be a third wish if I haven’t had a first and second wish?”

“You’ve had two wishes already,” the hag said, “but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That’s why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.” She cackled at the poor man. “So it is that you have one wish left.”

“All right,” he said hesitantly, “I don’t believe this, but there’s no harm in trying. I wish to know who I am.”

“Funny,” said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. “That was your first wish…”

A baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. “Jane” grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She falls in love with him, but just when things are looking up for Jane a series of disasters strikes: First, she becomes pregnant by the drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery doctors discover that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life, they most surgically convert “her” to a “him.” Finally, a mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling from these disasters, rejected from society, scorned by fate, “he” becomes a drunkard and a drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop’s Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the “time traveller corps.” Both of them enter a time machine and the bartender drops the drifter off in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan girl, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops the baby off in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time traveller corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together and becomes respected and elderly member of the time traveller corps, and then disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop’s Place in 1970.

Laura was woken by her father; something that he had not done since she was a child. As her thoughts slowly swam back into focus, she was suddenly sure that she had slept naked and he had seen her, but to her relief she was wearing her baby-blue pyjamas. God, what was he doing in here anyway?

“Come on, you,” he said brightly, opening the curtains and letting the sunlight in. Outside, she could hear a lawnmower running, perhaps in the next street, and what could’ve been birdsong. “It’s Button Day, remember? Get dressed, put something nice on. We’re leaving in an hour.”

Laura stirred, her voice groggy. “Dad, what the hell? Couldn’t you just knock? What if I’d slept nude?”
He didn’t look at her, he was too busy admiring his garden from the window. “Oh, you’ve nothing I haven’t seen before. I’m your bloody father, I‘ve wiped your arse many a time before now.”

“Not the point, Dad.“ Squinting, Laura sat up, rubbing her eyes, and remembered what he’d just said.
“Dad, did you just say ‘Button Day’?”

“Well, yeah. What, did you forget?” He laughed as he crossed the room to the door. “You were only talking about it last night.”

“Wait - what?” She frowned, not understanding. Something was wrong here. A fine way to start the day, really. She hadn’t even gotten out of bed yet, and she was already getting weird shit. “What are you talking about?”

He shook his head, still smiling as he left the room. “Get dressed. Breakfast is ready.”

He left her sitting up in bed, holding the covers to her breasts, a look of confusion on her face. Eventually she got out of bed, and began to pull some clothes on that were to hand. Familiar sounds floated up to her from downstairs: pots and pans rattling, the TV on low, the muffled tones of her family talking to each other, a short, harsh laugh - her brother. No doubt laughing at the TV.

She did her zipper on her jeans, and stood for a second before finally saying out loud, “Button Day?”

Read the rest of this entry »

You’re slowly stirred awake by the distant ringing as the phone beside your bed pulls you out of your dreams. Your thoughts gather themselves and you groan, reaching over to answer.

As soon as you place the phone to your ear, you’re greeted by the background noise consisting of twisted screams. People in agonizing pain begging for help or death, not that the interference allows you to hear any individual voice clearly enough.

“Get out of the house now!”

The call ends abruptly after what you could have sworn was a voice from closer to you than on the other end. You shift yourself to the side of the bed, sighing while rubbing your eyes. A call this startling and this early in the morning would keep you awake.

Your wife shuffles to the side, apparently also woken by the call. She wraps her arms around you and gives a light kiss on the neck.

“Don’t worry about it,” Her half asleep mumble calms you down somewhat.

Just as you’re about to place the phone down, it rings again. You fumble slightly and drop it. Instead, you feel your wife’s arms tighten around you, preventing you from leaning forward.

It’s then you notice a subtle difference between the arms around you and the familiarity of your wife’s.

“He’s too late to save you anyway.”

It’s early in the morning. The sun won’t be up for another couple of hours. You’re fast asleep in bed, lost in a dream, when the phone rings. Rather than waking up, you roll over and cover your head with a pillow. Hours pass. The sun rises. The phone is ringing.

When you wake up, your alarm clock is blaring and the phone is ringing. By the time you will yourself to turn the alarm off, the phone has stopped ringing. You realize that it’s been ringing all morning. You slide out of bed and press the blinking red button on your phone as you stumble into the bathroom. The phone beeps, followed by the friendly, electronic voice. Hello. You have six hundred and sixty-six new messages. Message one. The phone beeps again, and you’re not prepared for what comes next.

Screaming.

You spin around, thinking that she’s standing right behind you. There’s pure terror in her screams, accompanied by other disturbing noises. You stand there, horrified, for about ten seconds. Screaming gives way to hysterical, garbled crying before dying out with the sounds of spilling meat and tearing flesh.

The phone beeps again. You’re shaking.

Message two.

If you watch every State of the Union Address since it’s been filmed and available on tape, you’ll see that halfway through–exactly halfway through–the President always says the same word. Most say it under their breath during the standing ovations, but some are forced to work it into the speech itself.

Alone at work late one night, you are putting in a CD to install a program on your computer. The CD is unlabeled though you remember it being labeled like any other mass produced CD.
You put it into the drive, and find it to have no data on it either. Instead of the normal CD spinning sound, it almost sounded like screaming. It’s obviously the wrong CD and you find the real one soon, and continue your work.

Alone again on another night you need to back-up your hard drive on a blank CD, so you put one in. You hear the vaguely familiar screaming noise, but this time your computer screen goes blank for a few seconds, before the entire floor goes dark.

Now the screaming you hear is not coming from a computer drive, it’s coming from down the hall… and it’s getting closer.

ETA: If anyone feels like rewriting this one, give it a shot - I really like the concept, but the execution was really sloppy. If you can do it better, I’ll replace this version with yours.

In November 1930, Joe Labelle, a Canadian fur trapper, snowshoed into a thriving Eskimo fishing village situated on the shores of Lake Anjikuni in Canada. Labelle was greeted with an eerie silence. He thought this was very strange because the fishing village was a noisy settlement with 2,000 Eskimos milling back and forth to their kayaks. But there wasn’t a soul about. Labelle visited each of the Eskimo huts and fish storehouses but none of the villagers was anywhere to be seen. Labelle saw a flickering fire in the distance and approached it gingerly, sensing something evil was afoot on this moonlit night. Upon the fire was a smoldering pot of blackened stew. To make matters more mysterious, Labelle saw that not a single human track had left the settlement.

Labelle knew something bizarre had happened to the 2,000 people, and so he ran non-stop to the nearest telegraph office and sent a message about his findings to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Mounties turned up hours later, and they too were baffled by the mass vanishing act. An enormous search party was sent out to look for the missing villagers, but they were never found, and the search party unearthed some strange findings. All the sleigh dogs that had belonged to the Eskimos were found buried 12 feet under a snowdrift at the perimeter of the camp. All of them had starved to death. The search party also established that all the Eskimos’ provisions and food had been left in their huts, which didn’t make any sense at all. Then came the most chilling surprise of all; the search party discovered that all of the Eskimos’ ancestral graves were empty. Whoever or whatever had taken all the living villagers had also dug up the dead as well, even though the icy ground around the graves was as hard as iron.

Later on that unearthly silent night, the Mounties watched in awe as a strange blue glow lit up the horizon. The eerie radiance was not the northern lights, but seemed steady and artificial. As the Mounties watched, the light pulsated then faded. All the newspapers of the world reported the baffling disappearance of the 2,000 Eskimos, although many believed that a rational explanation would eventually come to light, but the Anjikuni mass disappearance is still unsolved.

One day, a kid got what he thought was a genius idea. He’d find a way to stay overnight in his school. Just to be able to say he did it, the idea of the story that it would make thrilled him. He had no idea how right he was.

The major problem of the plan was getting a key. He couldn’t just hide in corners the whole night, he wanted to explore. He also wanted to scope out the best places in the school for some after school activities with any girls interested. He began to think of himself as the king of the brick castle that he spent most of his time in. He just needed that key.

The only people that he thought would have a key to the entire school would be the janitors. They kept their keys on them, and had a spare set in their break room. He went in during lunch, when the janitors were on cafeteria patrol. He came into the break room and picked up the keys. He’d figure out what they were for later. As he was walking out of the room, amazed that it actually worked, he walked right into one of the janitors.

What are you doing back here?” inquired the custodian. The kid stammered for a few seconds, and ultimately decided to tell the truth. There was something about the man that said “You can trust me.” The janitor laughed and said “You know, I wanted to do the same thing when I was young. Something about having the whole place to myself, it was an intoxicating urge. I made the mistake of going to the top, thinking I could get the keys there. I got caught, and the old man expelled me, for lack of a better word.” Then he took a key off of his key ring and gave it to the kid. It was an odd key, he couldn’t properly tell what color it was. It seemed to keep changing, even when he held it still. “That key will open any door in the school for you. Enjoy, son.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Every child fears under their bed. If they don’t, they fear the closet, or maybe that little crack in the almost closed door.

Scientists know that children are more perceptive, they see things adults don’t. They aren’t yet tethered into only accepting what society wants them to accept. They see what is truly there.

They see the monsters.

If you were to borrow a child’s eyes and see through them for a night, you would go insane. To be able to see what you only dimly remember, burrowing into your covers while wearing those train pajamas, hoping to a God you can barely comprehend that “it” doesn’t see you back…would drive an adult crazy. Because Adults forget the rules.

1) Cover yourself. If you can’t see it, it can’t see you. Even if it makes it harder to breathe.

2) Don’t make a noise. Every whimper can lead to destruction.

3) Don’t move. It attracts their attention.

4) Only light can make them go away. Bright light. Flashlights make it worse.

Teens are caught in the middle. They still feel what’s there, but they cannot see… and they forget the rules….

Why do you think there are so many insomniacs typing at their computers, subconsciously praying the light from their monitor will be enough to keep them away?

It’s not. Now look behind you with a child’s eyes and try not to scream.

You don’t know it, but someone has been removed from your life. They haven’t died, they haven’t moved, they have simply ceased to be from present future and history. However you still know they were there, you faintly recall broken memories of someone else there, someone who should have been there but you think you’re crazy. You go to do something, but you can’t remember what …

It was them, they wanted to talk to you.

Every family in every town in every country on every continent has one. It’s a cabinet, not particularly odd, not out of place. The paint was peeling a bit on the corners and the knob was a bit loose. The inside smelled like dust and the paint wasn’t the same as the kitchen walls.

You hid in there once during a game of hide ‘n’ seek.

No one told you it doesn’t open back into your reality. Don’t worry, you can’t tell the difference.

But everyone misses you.

My grandfather served in the European Theater of Operations during WWII, an experience he rarely talks much about. I’ve only managed to coax one story out of him.

He and a low-ranking officer (granddad was an enlisted man) were travelling by jeep somewhere in Belgium with a cache of much-needed ammunition. Taking a wrong turn on an unpaved road they first became lost, then began to run low on fuel. They sought to ask some locals for help, as the Belgians were highly sympathetic to the Allied effort.

They spied a small hamlet, made up of fewer than a dozen thatched huts, and began walking towards it. They were met halfway by a group of three men dressed mostly in animal skins, all of whom spoke angrily in a language neither of them understood (not French, not German, and certainly not English).

Negotiations proved futile, and one of the three drew a small rusty knife. The Lieutenant drew his .45 sidearm in return and killed the man when he rushed at them as if to attack. This act scared the other two off.

Eventually they repaired the jeep themselves and found their way back to base by the next day. A report was filed, but not much made of it. The following winter the Lieutenant was killed in an artillery barrage, making my grandfather the only known living witness to the event.

Now what’s interesting is what reminded him of the story: we were watching a documentary on the development of language, this one specifically about the Saxon tongue, which thousands of years ago developed into languages like German and English. Granddad remarked how much it sounded like the words he’d heard that day.

There are exactly 17 people on this earth fated to kill you. If you somehow manage to avoid these 17 people during your lifetime, you are taken to a place of monumental beauty where you are stripped of all clothing and branded on the space just above your navel with a name. When you are sent back to earth, it’s your mission to kill the person branded on you.

(The database issues and the hosting switch seem to be taken care of concerning this website; and the forums are even back up!)

In Portland, Oregon in 1981, an unheard-of new arcade game appeared in several suburbs, something of a rarity at the time. This game was called “Polybius”. The game proved to be incredibly popular, to the point of addiction, and queues formed around the machines, quickly followed by clusters of visits from men in black. Rather than the usual marketing data collected by company visitors to arcade machines, they collected some unknown data, allegedly testing responses to the psychoactive machines. The players themselves suffered from a series of unpleasant side-effects — amnesia, insomnia, nightmares, night terrors, and suicide appearing as having been caused by the game in various versions of the legend. Some players stopped playing video games, while it is reported that one became an anti-gaming activist.